“The cross-section of poets with varying poetics and styles gathered here is only one of the many admirable achievements of this volume.”
—Claudia Rankine in the New York Times

The Golden Shovel Anthology celebrates the life and work of poet and civil rights icon Gwendolyn Brooks through a dynamic new poetic form, the Golden Shovel, created by National Book Award–winner Terrance Hayes.

An array of writers—including winners of the Pulitzer Prize, the T. S. Eliot Prize, and the National Book Award, as well as a couple of National Poets Laureate—have written poems for this exciting new anthology: Rita Dove, Billy Collins, Danez Smith, Nikki Giovanni, Sharon Olds, Tracy K. Smith, Mark Doty, Sharon Draper, Richard Powers, and Julia Glass are just a few of the contributing poets.

This second edition includes Golden Shovel poems by two winners and six runners-up from an international student poetry competition judged by Nora Brooks Blakely, Gwendolyn Brooks’s daughter. The poems by these eight talented high school students add to Ms. Brooks’s legacy and contribute to the depth and breadth of this anthology.

Peter Kahn is a founding member of the London poetry collective Malika’s Kitchen. He is also the founder of the Spoken Word Education Programme at Goldsmiths-University of London, and he directs the Spoken Word program at Roosevelt University in Chicago.

Ravi Shankar is an award-winning poet, author, translator, and founding editor of Drunken Boat. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Paris Review, and on NPR and the BBC; and his many books include Language for a New Century, Deepening Groove, and What Else Could It Be.

Patricia Smith is the author of seven books of poetry, including Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, Blood Dazzler, a finalist for the National Book Award, and Incendiary Art, winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. She is a professor at the College of Staten Island and an instructor in the MFA program at Sierra Nevada College.

Terrance Hayes is a winner of the National Book Award and a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. His most recent book is American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin.